There was a major influx of population to Okinawa in the fist millenium from Japan, which was some combination of NE Asian (Yaoyi), Ainu (not clear how that shows up in the ancestral population analysis) and Northern Chinese (mostly at the tail end of this time period). We have very little information about the extent to which Okinawa was virgin territory or experienced population replacement at this time. It is certainly plausible that any prior population mixed with Yaoyi immigrants in proportions similar enough to those of Japan’s main islands that the original inhabitants became geneticall indistinguishable from the other Japanese except that they lacked the same amount of Northern Chinese immigration.

I would lean towards Arabia through southern Iran through… But there it could be more genetically submerged, or underwater or desert now.

So, far from being a remnant of a very early wave of ‘negrito’ migration to Australia, the rain forest people were actually pretty recent occupants adapting to changing environment. Which pretty much shoots giant holes through Birdsell’s theory. Not completely, maybe, but it makes it look increasingly very unlikely.

I’m always fascinated by Aboriginal toxic plant processing – I try to imagine the process of discovery, and always find it difficult. I mean, some of the processes were fairly complex, and seemingly not intuitive.

http://www.bio-nica.info/biblioteca/Cosgrove2007AustraliaTropicalForests.pdf

The oldest settlement in the Queensland rainforest known to archaeology is at Jiyer Cave, dated to 4,000 years BP.

After reading the thread I´m confused about what to consider “Negrito traits” and how to explain the origin of these traits.

Negrito traits: for me a summary of negrito physical traits, if such a thing exists is: low stature (lower than the average of surounding peoples); curly hair; dark skin (black not brown); I would include also nose shape and maybe mouth and skull shape.
While New Guineans have some of this traits, I would not label them Negritos.

Negrito traits origin. Imo there are three competing hypothesis:
–negrito look is an adaptation to tropical rainforest: no matter how the original surounding populations looked, if you introduce a large enough group in a tropical rainforest, given enough time (how much is enough ?) you will get the full negrito traits package. Some consequences: poeples with Negrito looks can be unrelated; you expect to find Negrito looks wherever you find tropical rainforest and ancient peoples living there; you expect to not find Negrito look peoples outside tropical rainforest.
–negrito look is a remaining of the first Ooa population. The common traits are explained by descent and adaptation: the original Ooa population was living in tropical rainforest, migrated Ooa through a tropical rainforest or similar biome route and those populations that has been living in a tropical rainforest and isolated since then, has conserved the traits.
–negrito look explained by descent alone. Same as before but the original Ooa population looked like this even without living in a tropical rainforest and some of their isolated descendants Ooa has mantained their traits. Consequences: we would not be surprised to find negrito traits in isolated populations not living in tropical rainforest (any known case ?).

One key piece of information is what happened to the areas where we find Negritos today under extreme (cold) climate conditions, that is LGM:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Last_glacial_vegetation_map.png.

The match is almost exact: we find Negritos today exactly where we find tropical rainforest during LGM (I could not discern if the light brown color in the corn of Australia refers to tropical rain forest; the same regarding New Guinea north-east coast). We do not find them in places in SA and SEA where there are today tropical rain forest but not during LGM.
I think this rule out third hypothesis but let open first and second. If first is correct, present Negritos distribution says nothing about Ooa route. If second is correct it may say something.

P.s. An interesting link regarding the origin of another phenotype: fair eye and hair. In this case the explanation is sexual selection: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Frost_06.html

http://anthrocivitas.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2531

They’re probably all small. I’d say that’s about it.

Some of those don’t have black hair, either.

@ohwilleke
There is a recently described toe bone from the Philippines (Callao Cave) that pushes human arrival there back to at least ~67 ka. (published at length in the Journal of Human Evolution).

Yeah, I don’t have any ideology or set of priors that I filter stuff through. But it’s certainly not my field, so I tend to accept people’s analysis of data less questioningly than maybe I should, while trying to filter out the extraneous stuff.

Steve, I have encountered people in peninsular Malaysia who I am pretty sure were Semang – they looked very different from everyone else there – very much darker (except for some Tamils), skinnier and smaller in stature. But in real life, those crude indicators are really not too helpful – e.g. skin is not a colour, it’s a spectrum, has texture, etc; hair varies a lot. People vary a lot in darkness of skin just through UV exposure – e.g. Thai farmers go very dark in the sun. Really, it was the smallness and skinniness that hit me the most, among a general population that are not huge to begin with.

If you encountered Melanesians in real life, I doubt you would ever confuse them with sub saharan Africans, they are very different. But in real life, you have a lot more inputs – e.g. when I see someone, I don’t really mentally separate out the visual inputs from the aural or behavioural cues, it’s a package. Plus there’s context. But it never did occur to me that Melanesians would be closely related to Africans, there was never I time when I ever thought that. I can’t imagine why anyone would, unless they were just trying to fit everyone onto a very simple racial framework, using a few very crude classifiers. I read some of that stuff as a kid, but it was never credible to me.

By the way, the area where Australia’s “Negritos” lived is tropical rainforest. I have not met many of the Aborigines from that area. I did meet one older man who fitted the usual descriptions: short, relatively light skin, “rainforest hair” IIRC. The local doctor (GP, family doctor) showed me around the area and I met some of the people.

By way of analogy, I’ve looked at enough pictures of Melanesian to reach the point where I could tell them apart from sub-Saharan Africans with, say, about a 90% accuracy rate just from pictures. That’s not a terribly impressive capability, however, because they aren’t closely related at all.

What about the various flavors of negritos? Do they seem similar to those who know them, or is their similarity mostly just the obvious things: stature, skin, hair?

I don’t live in Australia much now, but I’m familiar with Peter’s book.

I agree.

It is a nice theory, but the data don’t support it.

Damn, no wonder I only managed to father one of them.

No, neither can I.